What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.